Wolverhampton's New Cross Hospital pays out £14m to fill rota gaps
New Cross Hospital spent more than £14 million on temporary staff last year and its wage bill for all workers went over budget by £5.7m.
The hospital's ongoing A&E crisis was partly to blame with agency workers being used to look after the huge volume of patients in the unit.
It comes as finance chiefs forked out £38m for a new emergency centre, with chief executive David Loughton insisting he'd rather the trust went into the red than lay-off staff.
The total bank, agency and locum wage bill of £14.1m was £1m higher than in 2013/14. Splashing cash on temporary staff has become a regular part of hospital budgets in recent years.
Bosses have a constant battle filling gaps in staffing rotas, with not enough permanent staff to cover shifts. But temporary staff will almost always be on far higher hourly wages than normal staff.
A finance report for the end of the 2014/15 financial year states that part of the budget overspend last year was due to 'nurse bank usage covering sickness and maternity leave and additional hours paid to medical staff covering on call rotas'.
The report added: "Division 2 overspend relates to the additional capacity wards and continued use of agency staff to backfill vacancies in A&E.
"The overspend on pay relates to agency for junior medical staffing to support the department and cover for four vacant consultant posts."
It was last month revealed that hospital finance bosses were deliberately going into debt to avoid having to sack staff.
Mr Loughton pledged to protect his staff despite the NHS trust having to save millions of pounds to cope with Government cuts.
He revealed he feared the deficit would have been as high as £30m when contract negotiations started. But that has been reduced to £2.4m, with Mr Loughton pledging: "We insist on making no cuts whatsoever to our staffing numbers."
The trust has a legal requirement to break even year-on-year. In 2013/14, hospitals and the ambulance service in the West Midlands spent £61m on reserve bank staff alone.
West Midlands Ambulance Service shelled out £1.1m, including £740,145 on 'additional clinical services' and £139,438 on admin and clerical staff.
A total of £6.1m was spent at New Cross with £4.3m of that going on nurses and care assistants and £909,000 on admin.
The new emergency centre at New Cross will open in November, costing £38m. It will feature a badly-needed new A&E unit, three times the size of the current one. New Cross Hospital was not available for comment.
